


building castles out of bedsheets

by bluexshift



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work, Sempersol Peak
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:00:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25903978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluexshift/pseuds/bluexshift
Summary: 4 + 1 of pivotal moments in nate and sebastian's relationship that revolved around beds
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character





	building castles out of bedsheets

**Author's Note:**

> i am mostly posting this for numbers reasons; this is fic about my d&d character nate and his childhood sweetheart sebastian, but is fairly easy to read without any kind of context
> 
> i'll explain where they ended up in the end notes :)

1.

You’re 10 years old. You’re ten, and he’s also ten, which only happens for a month every year but you like it, because you feel like it makes him a little more reachable. When he’s older, it’s another insurmountable barrier to the ones he already has. But he will be older, in a few minutes time, and you’re adamant this year that you’ll see it through with him.

You’ll get a hiding for this if you get caught, but it’s worth it, you think. You’ve not matured enough to realise it’s what you’re doing, but every fibre of you is determined to show him, the boy who flinched away the first time you tried to hold his hand, the boy who hasn’t known real kindness, that kindness and gentleness that you’re still holding on to as hard as you can.

You inch your way around your door, creeping along the hallway, carefully protecting the sweet bun you managed to steal from the kitchen this evening, and the candle haphazardly rammed in the top. It was fortunately in the first drawer you searched, and you realise later on, when you’re older, that the kitchen girl definitely knew what you were doing and simply let you, leaving the single candle in an easy to find place, but at the time you just believed that you’d been really sneaky and were filled with pride at your own accomplishment. The old house is quiet, but there’s always a buzz in the air, and the moonlight serves as enough for you to pick your way over to Sebastian’s room. It’s not far.

You enter the room and leave the door ajar, just to make it quieter when you do leave. He’s asleep already, his back turned to you, though he stirs slightly when you make your way over to him and sit on the edge of the bed.

You lean over and shake his shoulder, and he wakes with a start.

“Woah woah woah,” you whisper. “It’s okay, it’s only me.”

“Nate? What are you doing in my room? You’ll get caught and we’ll both-” You shake your head emphatically.

“We won’t get caught, and I won’t be long. Just wait for a second-“ and you wait, and he does too even though he still looks confused and concerned, until you hear the chime of the clocks begin, and you grin and light the candle.

“Happy birthday,” you say, and his face softens as he looks at the bun, and then at you, like he can’t quite understand why you’ve taken this risk just to wish him happy birthday at midnight. And then he smiles, incredulously, shakes his head and then blows out the candle. You hand the bun over to him, removing the candle and sticking it in your pocket with no care for the hot wax, because you have something else in there that you’re far more concerned about at the moment. You pull it out to show him.

“A rock?” he asks.

“Yeah, I got it from that fancy garden we were in the other week. It cleaned up really nicely and, I guess I wanted you to have something?” It had cleaned up well – a dark grey with brown stripes of varying thicknesses, small enough to comfortably hold in a closed hand. He looks at it, holds it out in his palm, before his fingers close around it and he pulls it close.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

“Of course,” you smile back. “We’re friends, right? Friends celebrate birthdays together.”

He simply nods, and as you slide off his bed to begin the creep back to your own, he catches your arm.

“Wait,” he asks, and you do, settling back down on the mattress as Sebastian tears the bun in two and offers you a piece.

“Friends share, too, right?”

You do get reprimanded the next day for getting wax on your pyjamas, but Leonas never learns how or why, and the memory of a moment where you two got to be just kids, eating confectionery at midnight in secret, is more than worth it.

2.

You made it out. You both made it, and you’re free, and now that you’re on a ship out of Yvesk entirely, you feel like you can let the giddiness win out over the extreme caution you had to show all the while you travelled south. It took a lot of convincing and a fair amount of the gold you had to get onto this ship, given it’s extremely apparent that you’re escapees – and while Leonas was never all as important as he seems to think he is, there’s probably a decently sized bounty on your heads. You both have disguises that you’ve cobbled together along the way, but it’s never infallible, so you just paid the asking price for a single journey and didn’t push your luck.

If you can help it, you’ll never come back here. There’s nothing for you here anyway, other than a future of perpetuating cruelty or a family somewhere that doesn’t want you anymore. All you have, and all you need, is either in the bag on your back or grinning at you from the bed you’ve been assigned.

Just the one single bed between you, mind, and he’s hogging it right now.

The ship set sail early this morning, and you got so very lucky with the timing, mere hours after you arrived at the docks. You don’t have to do much work, and the captain was pretty clear she wanted you out of the way for most of the voyage, but you helped out in the galley a little and the cook was grateful for it. You watched the sun set from the bow, you and Sebastian, appreciating it a lot more than usual. (“Maybe we should just become pirates,” he jokes. “It’s not like storms will be a problem for us.”)

Now, though, you’re tired, you’ve just gotten into your pyjamas, and he’s being a bit of a dick.

“It feels so good to have a bed again,” he exalts, spread-eagled and facing up to the ceiling of your small, private cabin.

“Is it? I wouldn’t know because you’re hogging it.”

“Oh, just give me a minute to savour it, dickhead.”

“You have ten seconds before I sit on you,” you say, and that’s exactly what you give him before you just flop down on top of him. He groans, and hits your arm, but you laugh. “I told you!”

“You’re so  _ annoying _ .”

“Then move, and I’ll stop being annoying.” You get up, and he does scoot aside, finally, so you can settle down next to him. “Gods, I haven’t shared a bed with anyone since I was a kid.”

“Never shared a bed with anyone before, so…” he shrugs. “And you’re all limbs now, great.”

(You shot up over the last year, much to Leonas’ annoyance and the tailor’s delight, and now you’re taller than him, just barely, and you think he takes personal offence at that, since it sort of undermines his constant reminders that he’s a whole 11 months older than you. But you know him so well now, and you get the feeling that he’s gone for a jab about your height to deflect from something else, and you’re pretty sure you know what.)

“You’re not worried about waking me up, are you?” You roll onto your side and prop yourself up to look at him directly as you say this.

“No,” is his sullen reply, after a few seconds of silence. He doesn’t look back at you, just stares at the ceiling. You hum, and lower yourself back down.

“Good. Because if you  _ were  _ worried about having bad dreams, I would just have to say that it’s okay and I’d actually rather wake up so I can help you calm down and get back to sleep, than find out the next morning that you didn’t get any sleep at all because you tried to deal with it on your own.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And then I’d be like, ‘Can you get the light now because I wanna pass out?’.”

The relief is evident on his face, and he smiles. “Good to know. If that were the case.”

You pull the blanket over you as he snaps his fingers, and the creaking of the ship in motion is oddly soothing, the waves deciding to be calm tonight, and if you wake up with your shoulder being repurposed as a pillow, you don’t say anything about it.

3.

The house outside the city can barely be called a house, if you’re honest, but it is home and it’s yours, so you love it anyway. It has just the three rooms, a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom, and one large room which has become just the bedroom, since you never need to entertain anybody. It was abandoned when you found it a few months ago, and far enough outside of the city that no one really batted an eye when two scrawny teenagers showed up and claimed it, since you weren’t causing them any trouble. You’re scraping by, barely, with the two of you securing weekend work at an apothecary in the city, but it’s enough of a safety net that you can think about your future, about what you can do with your lives now that they’re yours again.

It’s something that keeps you up at night sometimes; this lack of movement. At least before, there was always the goal of survival – and sure, that still is the goal, to keep the both of you alive – but now? Now you have the entire world to find your place in, and all you’ve known so far is how to succeed in Vetaarn, and you really have no idea what’s actually out there, and the potential seven decades you have ahead of you look awfully long.

That’s what’s keeping you awake tonight, anyway.

You’ve not felt it get truly cold here yet – the nights in Akaan contrasted so strongly with the day that it felt a little like betrayal, and the nights in Yvesk were as vicious as the culture. Here though, it’s a little after 11pm and the air is still heavy with the early summer heat, but the breeze touches your favourite spot just enough to soothe.

You find yourself sitting here often, this windowsill, reading by the rising and setting sun, never needing to sleep that long anymore. High enough that passers-by can’t see you, it overlooks the double bed you bought – actually bought. Everything else was either stolen along the way or picked up from other people’s trash and fixed up, but this, the two of you used the last of the items stolen from the old house to pay for, and the pride you felt when the delivery staff brought it in was immeasurable.

(You’re also well aware of what they thought the relationship between the two of you was, but really, you’d ended up sharing enough times over the past two years, either because it was cheaper or because one of you needed that physical closeness, that there was just no point in having separate beds anymore. You didn’t think about it further, because you’re sixteen and a little emotionally dense, but if you had, you’d probably have come to some realisations a bit sooner.)

Sebastian is asleep, facing away from you, on his side of the bed, and you’re so lost in watching the scenery outside, so lost in your worries, that you don’t notice him blindly reaching for you, nor him stirring at your absence.

“Nate?” he says, sleep hanging on his words. “What’re you doing?” He’s only opened one eye, blearily, but somehow he’s still the most handsome guy you’ve ever seen, annoyingly.

“Nothing, don’t worry about it. You go back to sleep,” you try to reassure, but he shakes his head.

“Come here,” he says instead, so you do.

“What’s up?”

“I was having a weird dream,” he says, as you settle in beside him. You open your mouth to say something in return to that, but he puts his finger to your lips to keep you quiet. “But it was a good one. And I think it should be real.”

You’re not quite sure what you think is happening - and then you’re not thinking at all, because he’s kissing you instead.

It’s not long, and quite chaste, but as he pulls back you can’t help but smile. You open your eyes to find his just a few inches away, and he’s smiling too, one of those rare, uninhibited ones, so you can’t help but to kiss him back. Carding your fingers through his hair, perhaps the only conscious thought you have for the rest of the night is simply: why the  _ hell  _ were you not doing this sooner?

4.

It’s maybe too cliché to say that it hit you like a ton of bricks; it was more like a sudden realisation of something you’ve always known to be true, but you didn’t know you knew it before.

Becoming “boyfriends” was an easy shift; really, the only difference is now you can kiss each other, and hold him in more ways than you did before, which you certainly do at any available opportunity. You’ve always been quite tactile, always held his hand and held him close at night, and now you get to know him in other ways; ways which were perhaps awkward in the initial moment, but were also just a natural progression of what you are to each other. It feels so  _ right _ , like you were made to fit each other.

Things have changed outside of yourselves over the past couple months – the apothecary you worked for is going through a dry spell, so you might have resorted to some of the things you picked up travelling through Akaan, just a little cleverer this time. You have a home here, after all, and it’s more imperative here to not get caught. You keep it low-level, relying on the political skills you were both taught and your natural charisma to carry you through, and drunks in inns and bars in the city are fairly easy targets for hustling games and conning with a sad story.

You’ve been building up new identities too, and as far as anyone else is concerned, you’re Elliot and Isaac – sometimes Ell or Isa, if you’re feeling sentimental in public – but at home, you’re yourselves, and it’s safe.

It’s early afternoon, and you’re inside to protect from the high summer sun. The bedsheets are piled up, your clothes minimal, bodies clammy, but he’s still pressed to you, trying to get you to blind-taste-test a box of assorted candies he’d grabbed from a unobservant stall keeper earlier that morning. It’s then, his laughter ringing round the room at the face you made at a particularly sour lemon sweet, that you realise, and it blooms in your chest.

He notices you’ve gone still, and his hand goes to your cheek, pulling you to face him. “What? Thanya, what is it?”

You shake your head in disbelief, a little, amazed that you simply just didn’t  _ realise _ until this moment and cover his hand with your own.

“I love you,” you whisper. He’s stunned, momentarily, and the world has ceased to exist beyond this.

“What?” he whispers back after a beat, like he doesn’t quite get it.

“You’re- I- I love you, Bastya. I just-”

He interrupts you then, with a kiss, and against your lips he tells you that he loves you too. It feels like the culmination of everything you’ve been through; a reward, that now, you get to be here, free, and you get to love him. It feels untouchable, on this bed, in that way that most things seem unchangeable when you’re sixteen and seventeen. It feels like something that can never be taken from you, something that outsiders will never touch.

+1

You wake up alone, for the second time in two days. Blindly, your arm reaches over, to cold and unslept sheets, before you remember -

He’s gone.

And you’re alone.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for getting this far, even if u just scrolled down to see!!
> 
> anyway sebastian left nate without warning to go back to where they were from, joined a cult, took over said cult, and they reconnected three years later by surprise when sebastian had taken captive someone that nate and the party went to rescue. long story short, the party killed the emperor, seb took over, and now he wants to sacrifice nate to bring back the death god he worships bc he believes nate is probably one of the very few people that could fill the role of the Hero in the ritual to do so. fun!


End file.
